The "squat" is considered to be the most productive strengthening movement of the entire body, and involves the body's largest and most powerful musculoskeletal systems. These systems include the lower back, the buttocks and hips, the large muscles of the thigh and knee the lower leg and ankle, and others. As a compound exercise, the squat utilizes several joints and muscle groups in unison and provides a wide variety of training applications to countless fundamental sports movements.
Being a "core" body movement, the squat has become the mainstay of "integrated athletic motion training" where gross motor skills and respective forces of athletic movements experienced during athletic participation are replicated against an opposing resistance. Essentially, integrated athletic motion training involves athletic movements such as jumping running, throwing, and so forth, closely replicated against an appropriate opposing resistance. Benefits of this training method includes gross motor skill acquistion, efficient strength transition to sport specific movements, a high level of fluid dynamic athletic strenght, and explosive homogenous power. Furthermore, proprioception components that sense body portion, movement, velocity, direction, timing and force production are developed, making a mind-body link that allows maximum athletic expression possible.
The integration of benefits from squatting, into athletic performances has yielded many problems due to the inability of squat related exercise devices to properly replicate (either passively or active) complex athletic movements associated with squatting. These movements involve complex gross body movements of the upper torso, hips and legs acting not only within an athletes sagittal plane, as most squat related devices are limited to, but also within the frontal and transverse planes that complete an athlete's three dimensional space.
Barbell squats and other similar mass engageable devices constitute the industries mainstay of squat related exercise devices. Though these devices provide proven training methods, they also yield inherent problems and limitations. Such devices create an elevated user's center of gravity, thus producing improper anatomical positioning and articulation of the lower back, hips, knees, and ankles resulting in potential injury and improper strength conditioning. The squat and other compound exercises performed explosively producr a considerable acceleration and momentrum differentation between the user and the engaged mass. This causes an irregular, out of user synchronization resistance and potential resultant injury from excessive jarring. Such potential for injury and irregular resistance, greatly limits the speed and proper simulation of athletic movements. Barbell squats and other similar mass engageable devices confine lifts to a vertically oriented direction within the user's sagittal plane. This is due to the difficulty in balancing the engaged weight, dampening transverse plane imparted momentum, and the potential for injury. Thus, proper integrated athletic motion training of squat related movements other than vertically oriented ones, are virtually impossible with these devices. Furthermore, the potential energy of the lifted engaged mass causes considerable fear and injury associated with failed attempts and therefore slows the progress of concerned users. In addition, the means in which barbell squats and similar mass engageable devices engage the user's upper shoulder regions are awkward, restricting, uncomfortable and require relentless monitoring, thus ultimately robbing critical benefits.
Squat related machines such as the leg press, hack squat and many others, attempt to correct the problem associated with barbell squats and are indeed successful in alleviating the danger of some injuries. However, in eliminating the hazard, such apparatus also eliminate the opportunity for proper integrated athletic motion training by restricting the user to predetermined paths of sagittal plane resistance. Like the barbell squat, this ultimately produces a great sagittal plane strength, developed through an unnatural center of gravity that is out of balance with strength capabilities available in the remaining frontal and transverse planes. Such sternght imbalances may result in injury within the improperly overtrained sagittal plane or to weaker planes of strength employed during athletic participation.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,679,107 and 2,986,314 both disclose weight or mass carrying yokes that facilitate attachment of selected weights to the user's shoulder vicinities. While such apparatus serve to distribute application forces of the weight bar of barbell squats, they still suffer from similar problems and limitations when proper integrated athletic motion training is attempted.
Various apparatus have been developed to lower the point of resistance below the user's shoulders. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,674,160 and 4,589,658 disclose a power squat apparatus in which a harness is used about the waist, with a central front and rear strap extending down and between the user's legs, to connect to a source of resistance. This arrangement, though obviously uncomfortable, adequately removes the potential of back strain and similar squat related injuries. However, it limits the benefits of the exercise to musculo-skeletal systems acting about the knee and ankle. Furthermore, the central strap arrangement limits exercise to those performed primarily in the sagittal plane, thus proper integrated athletic motion training is questionable.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,322,425 discloses a weight lifting exercise device that includes a rigid harness arrangment constructed of a rectangular frame suspended from the user's shoulders. Opposite ends of the frame include bars that mount selected weight plates. The rectangular frame is constructed to be sufficiently large to loosely encircle the user's upper abdomen. The rigid should straps extend upwardly and over the shoulder from the front and back bars of the rectangular frame. This loose fit, while adapting the device to be used b a large number of different sized individuals, becomes uncomfortable and potentially hazardous in use. Furthermore, the loosly fitting frame has an overall effect of placing the point of resistance engagement back at the superior regions of the user's shoulders, instead of spreading it out from the elevation of weight plate attachment. Thus, such a device suffers from inherent mass and engagement related problems and limitations associated with barbell squats.
A somewhat different approach is made in U.S. Pat. No. 4,371,162. This patent discloses and exercising device that makes use of a shoulder harness arrangement constructed of elastic bands providing resistance, extending from a foot board up and over the user's shoulders. An optional backstrap is provided which is selectively attachable between the elastic straps, to aid their retention on the user's shoulders. Although, this arrangement eliminates those mass related problems associated with barbell squats and similar mass engageable devices, it suffers from an extremely awkward and restricting resistance engagement and application means, that demands constant user monitoring similar to that of the barbell squat and ultimately limits proper integrated athletic motion training.